brhsagain

I agree that the word “just” carries that connotation but I disagree that it’s a bad thing. When I ask if we can just do something my intent is exactly to communicate that I think the thing is simple, that the details are unimportant (to me, to us) and that it ought to be easy to do (and if it’s not, that’s a problem in and of itself).

A lot of things are like this, and so to excise the word “just” would be to stop using a word that often concisely and accurately conveys what I’m trying to say.

It would be better if the article just said “this is rude.”

I've never seen so many epicycles in my life...

Back when I was building an IDE with a custom text editor, I initially used embedded Neovim thinking I would get the entire vim feature set out of the box for free. Unfortunately this became a never ending source of bugs. I think the fundamental problem was that my application was structured like a game with a main loop in a single thread, and Neovim turned text editing into an async operation, where I would have a separate thread reading events from Neovim and then trying to safely update the global buffer.

Also, I was constantly fighting/reverse engineering Neovim to get the granular level of control over behavior that I needed for a seamless integration. It’s just a type of programming that’s extremely frustrating and not fun.

In the end I implemented custom vim emulation from scratch and surprisingly it wasn’t that hard to get the “20% of features that people actually use 80% of the time,” except it’s more like 5% and 95%, and in exchange I could own the whole stack instead of depending on a third party black box. Never been happier to delete a whole subsystem of code in my life.

I've always heard "auth" to mean authentication and "perms" to mean authorization.

I dunno. On the one hand I hate “web dev” more than anyone. I think it has led to such an astronomical decline in software quality that if you described it to someone from the days when computers were 1000x slower, they straight up wouldn’t believe you.

That said… the article doesn’t really ring true to me. What he is saying about the complexity of each part of the stack (http, html/dom, css) is technically true, but that’s not really how it washes out in practice. This whole “CSS is a complex graphics engine!” “HTTP is a protocol you could write a whole dissertation about!” sounds like an argument being made by someone trying to make a rhetorical point about web. In practice for most of web dev you don’t need to understand the deep nuances of CSS or HTTP or whatever. Yes, there is a large breadth of material you have to learn but the depth you actually need in any one area is much less than the author is trying to imply.

And yes, web is trash, but for different reasons. In fact some of those reasons are the opposite of what the author is saying. He says that each part of the stack is so complex it should be a separate specialty. But the real problem is the very fact that things are so complex. Rather than accept that complexity and subdivide the field into different disciplines, we should get rid of all this unneeded complexity to begin with.

Why are financial crimes morally exempt in a way that, say, violent crime is not, even if the aggregate damage from the financial crime is greater? Unless you’re arguing that this isn’t possible?

What’s wrong with that argument? Doesn’t getting more money from the user mean that the user is choosing to pay more, which reveals their preference?

Do the cops “breaking procedure” know for certain if the accused are guilty? How can they?

Politicians know the electoral vote is what matters, so they adjust their campaign strategy to optimize for it.

Theoretically, after everything washes, the electoral vote is what the people want, because it reflects which of the two candidates, both of whom are optimizing intensely for the electoral vote, is able to get it.